“Moody’s slashed Nokia’s credit rating to ‘junk’ on Friday after the Finnish cellphone maker cut 10,000 more jobs and forecast a wider-than-expected loss, citing worries about its cash position and slow sales of new Windows phones,” Tenzin Pema and Terhi Kinnunen report for Reuters. “Equities analysts also cut their price targets on Nokia stock on fears the company would continue losing market share to Apple, Google and Samsung Electronics.”

“Moody’s is the third ratings agency to relegate Nokia to non-investment grade status, which means many institutional investors such as pension funds will not buy its bonds,” Pema and Kinnunen report. “S&P and Fitch made similar moves in April.”

Pema and Kinnunen report, “‘Today’s rating action reflects our view that Nokia’s far-reaching restructuring plan… delineates a scale of earnings pressure and cash consumption that is larger than we had previously assumed,’ Moody’s analyst Wolfgang Draack said in a note.”

This is the time Apple should get out their cash mountain and buy NOKIA. – for 2 reasons,
1. They own a shed full of mobile patents and still have some of the best mobile tech skills and tech – their phones rarely drop out; unlike others I could mention.
2. It would stuff MicroShaft

One would suspect that preening Nokia for sale to MSFT has been Elop’s strategy all along.

Nokia and/or RIM will be taken over soon, now that the price is right. No large corporation actually goes belly-up in the modern world, they just merge. As we all know, winning is privatized, losing is socialized.

seems “practical”, but I would imagine Nokia shareholders that lost big time would find the right lawyers, which in itself would be fun to watch monkey boy dance to, but if there is a merger, E-slop’s rewards would be in the form of a parachute.